A wealthy Wyoming rancher is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider corner crossing and overturn a Denver federal appeals court’s March ruling in a case that influences access to millions of landlocked public acres in the West.
“This case presents questions of profound legal and practical significance,” reads a petition filed last week by lawyers for Fred Eshelman, a North Carolina pharmaceutical mogul who owns a 22,000-acre ranch on Elk Mountain in Wyoming’s Carbon County, just north of the Colorado border.
Eshelmen in 2022 sued hunters who used a stepladder to cross from one public parcel to another on his ranch. The lawsuit argued the hunters were trespassing when they stepped above Eshelman’s private property at the checkerboard X intersection of public land.
Eshelman’s Elk Mountain Ranch spans some 50 square miles and includes 27 islands of federally managed public land totaling about 11,000 acres. The landowner said the hunters accessing those landlocked parcels in the Medicine Bow National Forest diminished the value of his land by $7.75 million.
A Carbon County jury in 2021 sided with the hunters. A Wyoming District Court in 2023 also agreed that the hunters, who did not touch private land, were not trespassing. And in March, the U.S. 10th Circuit County of Appeals in Denver ruled the hunters did not violate Eshelman’s property rights when they stepped across that intersection of parcels in a practice known as corner crossing.
Eshelman last week asked the country’s highest court to review the 10th Circuit panel’s unanimous ruling.
“The decision to upend decades of consensus about property rights affecting millions of acres of checkerboard land is already sowing confusion among landowners and recreationists,” reads Eshelman’s Hail Mary 45-page writ for certiorari filed by his Denver-based legal team at the Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer firm.
The petition to the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that the 10th Circuit decision essentially granted easements across private property and Eshelman suggests this opens the door to “widespread unconstitutional takings” of private land without compensation, “thereby stripping landowners of one of the most treasured rights of property ownership — the right to exclude.”
The checkerboard ownership pattern of land in the West dates back to the 1820s, when Congress began distributing land in interspersed squares. It’s been an issue for about 150 years, especially as cattle ranchers began fencing their land, isolating and closing access to millions of acres of public land sandwiched between private parcels. The Eshelman squabble over corner crossing could deliver some conclusion to decades of access issues around isolated pockets of public land.